Survival
by bluemoongirl
Summary: After losing all his companions, alone, the Doctor returns to the end of the universe, follows a signal from the last remnant of civilization, and finds a strange form of hope. Can humanity survive The End?


Set after the Donna season finale, before the 2008 Christmas Special. I don't own anything in this story.

* * *

He didn't know why he went back there. Back to that cold, collapsing world. Even with his insider's track on time, "the wibbly wobbly ball of timey-wimey stuff", it felt so wrong to be there. He knew everything comes to an end, knew it better than most. He had seen civilisations end, and sometimes he had ended them. But Time, that shouldn't end. Time was all there was. Even the Void was ultimately defined by it, if only because a distorted version of it was all there was there.

The last time he was here, at The End, it had been an accident. He had met the last remnants of humanity, clinging stubbornly to hope, to hope of a refuge where they could withstand the storm, hope of Utopia. He knew it was hopeless, but he'd chosen to be inspired by them. Humanity: his adopted people, almost. He could always see their potential, and had watched them develop into the dominant power in the known universe over billions of years. Now they were reduced to fleeing the darkening stars, in a shrinking universe that was crushing down upon them.

That hope, the imagination and drive that made him love them had been subverted by the Master into a desperation so deep they had, under the guidance of their insane but brilliant leader, devolved themselves into whirling orbs of unthinking death. The Toclafane: the ghouls from the nightmares of the children of Gallifrey, realised at the end of everything by the Master. Just humans, raging against the dying of the light.

He had wondered how those few humans who had found out about the true nature of the Toclafane continued. How did their minds not break, as poor Mrs Saxon's had? His people had died to save the universe, while humanity had held on, to finally limp across the finish line of everything. What for? There would be no prizes in this race. Better not to see the final stretch.

And yet he had returned. Maybe it was because the Master had managed to find some form of solace here, in his human alter-ego. Maybe it was because the end of things was just pressing upon him again, having waved goodbye to all his companions again. Sarah Jane, Mickey and Jackie, Martha, Donna who didn't even remember him. All of them, including Rose. Rose…

Maybe the TARDIS made the decision for him.

Scanning the surrounding light-years of space had revealed almost nothing. Just the flickers of worlds slowly going out. Most life had ended, and what remained either clung to rocks and drifted in oceans as it had in the beginning. Sentience, where it still existed, had retreated. There was no more culture, just scavenging. Who'd want to be aware of the end of existence?

There was only one result that wasn't a fading SOS from some evanescent civilisation. The TARDIS locked on to it. It was weak but recent. He twiddled a dial on the console, boosting the signal, then stood back, dumbstruck, as 'The Blue Danube' floated out throughout the room. It was replaced a few moments later by an audio capture of a mindcast by the legendary Nuvo Ionian artist Y22DaRuGan from the early 84th Century, and then again by an actual recording of William Shakespeare reading through lines from 'King Lear' with a rowdy theatre company. The Doctor grinned, and the TARDIS whirred into action.

After materialisation, the readings revealed that the TARDIS was now two hundred and thirty five miles underground, in a planet about ninety times the size of Earth. It would be an impressive structure for a civilisation at its height to construct, but now, it was unbelievable.

He stepped out. Even more impressive, he thought, life-support systems fully operational. He took a breath of air. It was identical to optimum Earth atmospheric conditions. Very impressive. And he wasn't feeling the least bit crushed by the miles of rock above him and the massive gravitational field this planet should be generating…

He was so absorbed by the technical feat of his new surroundings that the appearance of a human took him by surprise. It stepped up to him, tapped him on the shoulder, and said, "Hi." He spun around, a huge grin on his face. "Hello! I must say, before we begin, all this, this is fantastic! How'd…?"

"Glad you think so, Doctor," the human answered smoothly. The Doctor's normally unstoppable barrage of words was sharply derailed. He stood, open-mouthed for a moment, staring at the person in front of him. It was perfectly androgenous, and while it had the "classic" human shape (two arms, two legs, etc), it lacked any individual features whatsoever. It should have been eerie, but it wasn't. It, as a person, defied any words except perhaps "normal", "typical", "average".

"Ok…" began the Doctor. "I'm not used to not introducing myself. Could you do me a big favour and tell me who you are? It would really help me out."

"I don't have a name, sorry. Unlike you," for a slice of a microsecond, it took on the form of River Song, who's eyes glinted knowingly at the Doctor above a mouth pulled into the slight bow of a loving smile. The Doctor couldn't help himself, and stepped backwards, his mouth forming her name in astonishment as the blank figure replaced her again. "I'm not actually a human. I'm all ever existed. Our memories, Our knowledge, Our feelings, Our imagination. Our souls, even, I'd say. I am the sum total. I am We." As it spoke, it seemed to shimmer, and in its face the Doctor could think he saw every human he'd known, although it was too fast to register. It watched his reaction, smiling. "We are all saved. Until the end, anyway."

"How?" It was all he could manage.

"You remember the Library? It was an early experiment in this sort of preservation. It began saving books, and moved on to people. And people are more precious than anything. We moved on to saving people. First ones that were dying at the time. They were saved at the moment of death. Then came the discovery of effective time travel. That allowed us to save key figures throughout our history. The big breakthrough came when we discovered how to save anybody from any time, automatically. Consciousness leaves an impression. We save it. Obviously, it's a lot more advanced than the technology you saw in the Library. We've had billions upon billions of years to develop it from then."

"How do you do it? The energy it must take to keep this… the storage space…"

"You're not used to hearing this, Doctor, but you've never met Us before. You wouldn't understand. This, We, are the culmination of the minds of every human that ever existed. You think you can get your head around it in a flying visit?"

"Hang on, that's a bit rude! You can at least give me the basics."

"You wouldn't understand it. Trust Us. We can't even try, without doing to your mind something similar to what happened to Rose when she looked into the time-vortex, or Donna when she underwent the meta-crisis. And it's certainly not quite time for you to move onto your next regeneration. Besides, you never put that much effort into explanations for your companions."

The "timey-wimey" speech came back to haunt him. "Fair point, I suppose. Still, at least tell me what the plan is now. What are you doing here? There's not much humanity left to save. How are you planning on riding out The End?"

"When this storage facility was constructed, it was calculated to be big enough to provide space to save all the rest of humanity that would exist, and obviously preserve those already saved. It was a fairly simple prediction, given that we know precisely when everything will end. We've been preparing for it now for four hundred and ninety seven billion years."

"When you say we, do you mean you've been alone here for that long?"

"We can't really say "alone". But yes, no individual human has been in this facility for that long. We know what has happened to those who have stayed out there," it muttered darkly, "more and more are saved every moment…"

"So are you just going to wait here until it all ends?" the Doctor asked with dismay. "You're not fighting it?"

It looked at him scoldingly. "Of course we're fighting it! Don't you know us at all? It's just, we're really not sure if we can. We don't know if what we're trying will work."

"What exactly are you trying?"

"Just to survive. It seems, unfortunately, that it is impossible to save people, or any trace of our consciousness, from the End."

The Doctor sighed inwardly. It was as he expected. Everything ended.

"Our one hope of survival, and it is just a hope – there is nothing assuring us it will work – is to bounce back a "memory" of humanity through time, back to the beginning of the universe from the very end. We expect that after this universe collapses in on itself, it will either re-expand and repeat, or explode in a new combination. If it's the former, then if we succeed, humanity will have a head start in the repeat of this universe. If it's the latter, then it will be the new world we have always dreamed of, achieved at last. If it works."

The Doctor was trying not to be outwitted by a human, even this, or these, humans. "So you're thinking about creating some sort of probability wave that makes humans more likely to arise in whatever comes next, bargaining on something happening next of course…"

"Well, if you want to simplify it to the edge of sense, then yes. We prefer to call it a memory of humanity than a probability wave. It will probably not work, but when has that ever stopped us?"

"Never," the Doctor agreed. "What do you anticipate going wrong? Don't write anything off before you've got going."

"A memory, or a probability, is a vague thing, Doctor. What is created by it may not be describable as human at all. Even if it works as well as we dream it could, there will be inevitable changes."

"Change can be good."

"Yes, obviously. Maybe we could be better next time round. A little more life, a little more heart…" It trailed off, looking at the Doctor with a strange expression. It was a mix of sadness, acceptance and recognition. "Time to go now, Doctor. We have much to prepare for, and not much time. Only another two point four six three one recurring years, actually. It goes so fast… Goodbye. Thank you for all you've done for us. You helped inspire us to find our better natures. Something to aspire to, even."

The Doctor found himself locked in a teleport beam, then back in the TARDIS. The engines spun up, and he found himself being whisked away from the hollow, artificial planet in the darkening sky.

When he lands in Victorian London, he finds it surprisingly easy to entertain the notion that the strange man he runs into almost immediately is the Doctor, even though he's only human.

* * *

A/N: What do you think? Just got the idea, and had to write it. Cheers for reading.


End file.
